Tuesday, 24 October 2017

The world is full of surprises. Everywhere you look, there is always a new technology meant to amaze you. Technology keeps on moving forward and there is no stopping it even if you are the type of person to ignore technology in your life. Modern advancements continue to be developed throughout the world and mankind waits in anticipation for the next big tech breakthrough to hit the market. Who would’ve thought humans will eventually be slaves of their smart gadgets? Almost everyone owns one now and they keep tinkering with it 24/7 up to the point that they even lose sleep because of their intense #FOMO or fear of missing out especially on social media.

We can only expect things to get more outrageous as the years go by. You think smartgadgets are the end of it? I’m afraid not. There are artificial intelligence and quantum computing to watch out for. And to bring more excitement to our lives, futuristic computer hardware will no longer be the sleek boxy–type we see today. You won’t have a need for them as the computer you’ll be using will be your very own desk. Mind. Blown. I. Know. It’s what experts call the digital desk and it is similar to any metal workstation we are seeing now except that it can do a lot of crazy stuff like what your current computer can do and even more.

IN THE EARLY 1990s, Xerox Parc researchers showed off a futuristic concept they called the Digital Desk. It looked like any other metal workstation, aside from the unusual setup that hovered overhead. Two video cameras hung from a rig above the desk, capturing the every movement of the person sitting at it. Next to the cameras, a projector cast the glowing screen of a computer onto the furniture’s surface.

Using Xerox’s desk, people could do crazy things like highlight paragraphs of text on a book and drag the words onto an electronic word document. Filing expenses was as easy as touching a stylus to a receipt and dragging the numbers into a digital spreadsheet. Suddenly, the lines between the physical world and digital one were blurred. People no longer needed a keyboard, mouse, and screen to harness a computer’s power; all they had to do was sit down and the computer would appear in front of them.

Despite its novelty—or maybe because of it—the Digital Desk never took off. Technology moved in the opposite direction; towards the glassy, self-contained boxes of smartphones, tablets, and laptops. But researchers never gave up on the vision, and now more than 35 years later, these half-digital, half-physical workspaces might actually make sense.

You’ll no longer be limited to what your screen can offer because you have your entire desk to utilize as you please. Desktopography will likely be the future that’s awaiting us on the use of technology at a personal level. It’s like smart technology right now that makes use of touch screen but on an entirely different medium. Researchers are already working on it today, so maybe we can already include it in our wishlist several years from now.

The idea of building a computer that uses light rather than electricity goes back more than half a century. “Optical computing” has long promised faster performance while consuming much less energy than conventional electronic computers. The prospect of a practical optical computer has languished, however, as scientists have struggled to make the light-based components needed to outshine existing computers. Despite these setbacks, optical computers might now get a fresh start—researchers are testing a new type of photonic computer chip, which could pave the way for artificially intelligent devices as smart as self-driving cars, but small enough to fit in one’s pocket.

A conventional computer relies on electronic circuits that switch one another on and off in a dance carefully choreographed to correspond to, say, the multiplication of two numbers. Optical computing follows a similar principle, but instead of streams of electrons, the calculations are performed by beams of photons that interact with one another and with guiding components such as lenses and beam splitters. Unlike electrons, which must flow through twists and turns of circuitry against a tide of resistance, photons have no mass, travel at light-speed and draw no additional power once generated.

Fast-forward into the future and because of our dwindling natural resources, we have no choice but to tap renewable energy sources to fuel our many innovations. Optical computing is now being considered mainly because of its lower energy demands as compared to the gadgets we are using right now. The technology will also make use of light-based components to make it work. It may even be used to improve current AI developments to make them more sustainable and environment-friendly.

While many of these new technologies are still untested, they are already in the works in various testing labs across the globe that will help determine the course mankind will take in the future. For the meantime, we are stuck with age-old tech dilemmas like data and hard drive recovery that has plagued computer users for quite a while now. But there’s no reason to fret for we are here to extend professional assistance to these technical issues. For problems concerning data recovery, hope this helps enlighten you: http://www.harddriverecovery.org/blog/data-recovery-tools/. For hard drive recovery, try this one instead: http://www.harddriverecovery.org/blog/how-to-choose-a-hard-drive-recovery-service/. Feel free to give us a call for any problem involving the two and we assure you of our expert assistance at a reasonable price.

Sunday, 8 October 2017

Ransomware attacks are happening quite often now that many businessmen and even world leaders are worried about its disastrous consequences to society. Cyber criminals are becoming more brazen in carrying out these attacks and the latest string of attacks not only annoyed individual computer users but attacked various servers throughout the world making the discomfort and disruption felt on a global scale.

From its humble beginnings in Ukraine, a new cyber malware spread across the globe just recently and infected computers from different corners of the world. From a simple download of a famous tax accounting package or a peek at a local news website, this web virus stealthily infected Ukranian computers before going farther. And similar to the WannaCry attack, this new bug demanded a $300 ransom in bitcoins forcing 30 unfortunate victims to shell out the money in the hopes of getting their data back.

A ransomware attack hit computers across the world on Tuesday, taking out servers atRussia's biggest oil company, disrupting operations at Ukrainian banks, and shutting down computers at multinational shipping and advertising firms.

Cyber security experts said those behind the attack appeared to have exploited the same type of hacking tool used in the WannaCry ransomware attack that infected hundreds of thousands of computers in May before a British researcher created a kill-switch.

“It's like WannaCry all over again,” said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer with Helsinki-based cyber security firm F-Secure.

He said he expected the outbreak to spread in theAmericasas workers turned on vulnerable machines, allowing the virus to attack. “This could hit theU.S.A.pretty bad,” he said.

Cyber attacks like this one are becoming a common occurrence as cyber criminals become more adept in breaking down defensive barriers of most computers. It’s even worse when computer servers are hit because of the possible extent of the damage. Knowing how globally interconnected everyone in the globe is right now, it is no longer surprising for a simple cyber attack like this to go global in just a few hours.

Ukrainian police on Tuesday seized the servers of an accounting software firm suspected of spreading a malware virus which crippled computer systems at major companies around the world last week, a senior police official said.

The head ofUkraine's Cyber Police, Serhiy Demedyuk, told Reuters the servers of M.E.Doc -Ukraine's most popular accounting software - had been seized as part of an investigation into the attack.

Though they are still trying to establish who was behind last week's attack, Ukrainian intelligence officials and security firms have said some of the initial infections were spread via a malicious update issued by M.E.Doc, charges the company's owners deny.

The owners were not immediately available for comment on Tuesday.

Premium Service, which says it is an official dealer of M.E.Doc's software, wrote a post on M.E.Doc's Facebook page saying masked men were searching M.E.Doc's offices and that the software firm's servers and services were down.

Following the said attack that originated in Ukraine, the police now have in custody the servers of the alleged accounting software firm that facilitated the spread of the malware and are currently being investigated considering how disastrous this attack has been. Police Intel says that pro hackers have already been planning the attack for months and were the ones who introduced the vulnerability into the firm’s program. In an effort to help affected individuals or organizations cope with this disaster, the Ukranian government extended its tax deadline so the victims have more time to prepare the necessary documents they just lost.

Backing up your data is a must knowing that these ransomware attacks are just lurking somewhere and patiently waiting for an opportune time to strike. If you feel that it is too tedious for you, though, just prepare yourself for potential problems involving data recovery: http://www.harddriverecovery.org/clean_room.html because you’ll likely have to deal with it if you are using an outdated system.

For bigger and older model servers, they are the perfect recipe to make these ransomware attacks a reality because of their many vulnerabilities. Once your server gets hit and it’s a RAID server, read about http://www.harddriverecovery.org/server-recovery/ to find out how you can bounce back from this unfortunate situation. It’s no longer an option to be complacent anymore because cyber criminals are more aggressive than ever. Learn to protect your device or risk paying for our professional (yet affordable) services to get you out of this mess.